Fayard, Jean-François <br/><br/>
Is “Dangerous Liaisons” a Book about Boredom? 

 -  2017.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 2 
<br/><br/> Would evoking the theme of boredom in a work such as Dangerous Liaisons ( Les Liaisons dangereuses) by Choderlos de Laclos, amount to a deliberately provocative approach or, still more crudely, a blatant literary oxymoron? And what if, in this book, which is a sort of “novel of manners” in the Enlightenment era, the round of love-affairs was no more than a smokescreen aimed at obfuscating the real intrigue, namely, the struggle of sentimental libertinism against a sense of boredom born of social idleness whose culmination would be called: Terror?